It’s hard enough to keep kids off social media when their friends all have accounts. But when the pressure comes from school clubs, sports teams and even churches, parental efforts to delay the leap can feel futile.

The convenience and popularity of group chats and social media have led many coaches, teachers, club supervisors and youth-group leaders to suggest kids join apps like Instagram, WhatsApp and Discord. It’s a tough situation when children become too old to have mom and dad handle every school and team communication,...

It’s hard enough to keep kids off social media when their friends all have accounts. But when the pressure comes from school clubs, sports teams and even churches, parental efforts to delay the leap can feel futile.

The convenience and popularity of group chats and social media have led many coaches, teachers, club supervisors and youth-group leaders to suggest kids join apps like Instagram, WhatsApp and Discord. It’s a tough situation when children become too old to have mom and dad handle every school and team communication, yet are still too young, in their parents’ eyes, for social media. Yet it’s not like kids are going to respond to email—or even read it.

Michael Kaufman, a customer-service representative in New York City, said he had a firm rule with his three children: No social media until age 13, when kids are technically old enough to sign themselves up for apps.

So when his oldest daughter’s middle-school science teacher asked the students, then 11 years old, to take photos of their projects and post them on Instagram, he alerted the principal, who put an end to that effort. More recently, the same daughter, now in high school, joined a school photography club where the students were told they’d be sharing their photos on Instagram. She chose to leave the club instead. “She has very little interest in social media,” Mr. Kaufman said. “I know she’s the outlier.”

Mr. Kaufman’s younger daughter, however, really wanted TikTok but only got it in April, when she turned 13. She wanted to join the video-sharing app because all the girls in her dance team were posting videos of themselves practicing their routines to provide feedback to one another.

In the years since his oldest daughter was first encouraged to join Instagram, the risks that social media poses to kids have become clearer, giving parents like Mr. Kaufman greater pause before allowing their kids to sign on.

Cyndi Schmitt, a mother of four in Tampa, Fla., doesn’t allow her kids to be on Instagram. However, their church youth groups have used Instagram to post photos and updates about events. As a result, she said, “We missed out on a few things or were a little out of the loop at times.”

She said that, while she would like it if the church continued putting events on websites as well as social feeds, she didn’t raise her concerns because she wanted the youth-group leaders to be able to reach the kids who were already on Instagram. “I’m super-excited that the church is reaching out to students where they are,” she said.

One mother in a small town near Seattle told me that her daughter’s school band group joined Discord and that her 16-year-old ended up communicating with a stranger who solicited nude photos from her.

“We can’t sacrifice privacy and safety and kids’ mental health just for the convenience that the ubiquity of these platforms offer,” said Bethany Robertson, co-director of ParentsTogether, a nonprofit family-advocacy group in Washington, D.C.

Kids use tech to socialize even without social media. A mom in Vancouver, British Columbia, said after her daughter’s sixth-grade class began using the chat function in Microsoft Teams during remote school, drama quickly ensued. Her daughter and a classmate got into an argument in the chat and others joined in. The mom said she notified the school, which disabled the chat function.

What you can do

So how can parents handle the pressure their kids face to join group chats and social media?

Develop a social-media agreement. Laura Tierney, founder of the Social Institute, a company that partners with schools to teach students how to navigate social media and technology, said it’s best to start discussing responsible social-media use with kids early. “Because social media is not going away, you can’t restrict it and then throw them in at age 13,” she said.

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Ms. Tierney suggests families develop a social-media agreement to lay out rules such as whether a child’s account is set to public or private, who gets to approve friend requests and how often parents can monitor the account. The Social Institute offers a template on its website.

Create a shared account. Instead of letting kids loose with their own account, you can create one that you control and let them use it only for the purpose of communicating with the school club. You can set up two-factor authentication so that a code gets sent to your email address or cellphone every time your child wants to log in. My editor did this when family friends wanted their preteen sons to communicate over Discord. Just make sure your child logs off when the activity or communication is done.

Take advantage of app settings. If you feel your child is ready to use social media, you can still enact app settings to help protect them. Some teens find they enjoy Instagram more when they turn off the comments and likes. My colleague Joanna Stern provided tips on changing the default settings in apps to create a better experience, such as disabling autoplay on YouTube

videos. There also are ways to restrict content and direct messages on TikTok  and Discord, and to control who can add your children to groups and view their profile information on WhatsApp.

Suggest alternatives. There’s no reason for students to be limited to communicating on Big Tech’s biggest platforms. There are plenty of apps designed for students to receive reminders, schedule practices, share videos and photos and communicate in small, private groups. Alternatives used by many teachers and sports teams include Remind, GroupMe, Flipgrid, Band and PhotoCircle.

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Write to Julie Jargon at julie.jargon@wsj.com